Andrew Marr - The World I Fell Out Of

It was a cold, blustery Sunday in late March, ordinary in the way days always are before extraordinary things happen. We had slept late and it was mid-afternoon before we headed to the nearby village for provisions. By then, the sky looked unkind. As we reached the point where our farm track joins the public road, we glimpsed a tall man in hiking gear, carrying a large pack, striding purposefully away from civilisation towards the forests and hills. There was something about him that I couldn’t put my finger on, that made me notice him. He had a pleasant face but he looked – what? Anxious? Embarrassed? In a hurry?

‘Bit late in the day to be going that way,’ I remarked to Dave. Or maybe I just thought it. I can’t remember now.

Dropping down into the village, we passed a neighbour out inspecting his hedgerow. A non-gardener, wearing smart trousers and a ski anorak, poking suspiciously at the unforthcoming soil. We slowed to say hallo, holding the car on the brake, not committed enough to put the engine in neutral.

‘Just spoke to some crazy foreigner,’ he said. ‘Lost his way off the West Highland Way. I told him, I said, you’re miles off, and he wanted to know what he should do, but I just told him, you’ll need to head back the way you’ve come. Some people, eh?’

I waited in the car while Dave was in the shop. Rain started to blur the windscreen and I felt troubled. For the record, I’m no Mother Teresa. I don’t make a habit of picking up lame ducks and I’m ever so slightly impatient with those who do. But there’s something about travellers stranded on roadsides by breakdowns, or people who look lost, or in distress, that always makes me falter. Some primitive instinct, which I rarely act upon, makes me want to stop and offer help. Usually I dither, fail to act in case I look stupid, drive by and then regret it: the infinite frozen impulse, the wasted generosity, of the shy. The almost-nearly good Samaritan. Which, if you ask me, is more irritating than someone who lacks the impulse in the first place.

Being truly honest, I was still haunted by an incident from decades ago, when I was inside a tube station in London’s West End, rushing for the last train after a show. There was a young man slumped against the wall at the bottom on the stairs, causing people to crush and crowd in their haste to get past. He had a bloodied stump, one leg freshly amputated at the knee, and he looked utterly desperate. He held a piece of cardboard which said: ‘Please help me get back to Scotland’. And as I slowed, appalled, wanting to help, my companions grabbed me by the arms and hustled me onto a train. ‘C’mon! We haven’t time.’ And for thirty years I’ve regretted not stopping to help that boy, often wondering what his story was. Did he ever get home?

This time, though, was different. I knew that road back over the hills was long and exposed and I felt emboldened.

When Dave got back in the car, I said: ‘I think we should go and offer that guy a lift.’

‘What guy?’

‘The walker. The crazy foreigner.’

‘You are kidding.’ He turned to look at me as if I had sprouted two heads.

‘Why?’ He wanted to sit by the fire and read the Sunday papers.

‘Because it will be pitch-dark long before he gets back to where he started, let alone where he was supposed to be going. It’s pouring now and he’s ten miles off course in the middle of nowhere.’

‘He could be anyone. He could be some Eastern European axe-murderer.’

‘Imagine if it was you, or us.’

So we ignored our turning for home and carried on the hill road. We caught up with him toiling into the dusk, a dark figure on a lonely ribbon of tarmac, just before he began the ascent to the moor. He didn’t look like an axe-murderer.

We picked him up at the bottom of the hill on the Moor Road.

‘Would you like a lift?’ we said. ‘We heard you were lost.’ Speaking slowly and clearly so he could understand.

He smiled and put his sodden pack in the boot and climbed into the back seat, dripping. He seemed profoundly grateful and he expressed it in English. Excellent English, in fact. Our crazy foreigner was a Canadian university philosophy lecturer, a handsome, intelligent man in his thirties with a gentle manner. He’d flown over to attend a conference at Aberdeen University on, and I think I remember this rightly, Thomas Reid, a little-remembered Scottish moral philosopher of common sense during the Enlightenment. With the conference over, our academic had had a few days to play with before his flight home, and had a fancy to try the long-distance footpath that wends from Glasgow into the Highlands. After leaving his B&B in the morning, he’d missed a turning and had walked all day in the wrong direction. Looking back now, I suspect he was a dreamy, erudite man who just wanted to walk in the mountains, rather than a practical map reader.

By the time we got him back to the village where he’d slept, it was lashing rain and almost dark. He was a day out of sync with his accommodation. We insisted on taking him on, by road, to where he had booked a bed for the night. He protested mildly, not disguising his gratitude. When we stopped, at the car park by the shores of Loch Lomond, he got out, retrieved his pack from the boot, and returned to the driver’s window. He leant down to thank us. We knew we would never meet again.

‘You’re good people,’ he said warmly. ‘Good things will happen to you.’

Five days later I fell off my horse and broke my neck.

CHAPTER ONE

Who rides the tiger cannot dismount.

CHINESE PROVERB

I was happy, I do remember that, although those were the days when I rarely stopped long enough to appreciate it. Isn’t it always the same old story – that hindsight is the teacher who always arrives too late and says I-told-you-so? We’re always blissfully ignorant and complacent leading up to life-changing events.

So, how to pin down those hateful seconds which I will gnaw regretfully over for the rest of my life? One moment I was cantering towards a small-to-medium-sized cross-country jump, relishing the unity with my own, my very own, lovely handsome chestnut Champion the Wonder Horse, high on the hill and the thrill and the freedom and the wind in my face.

I was hearing the little girl inside me crying out, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ – the next moment I was pinned to the ground with a broken neck and fractured lower back. I was conscious throughout; I knew it was catastrophic. I said, ‘Ow!’ to myself when my face slammed into the turf, and then I experienced a blinding red flash and felt my whole body suffuse with a most beautiful, intense feeling of warmth; my own internal nuclear explosion; my own terrible mushroom cloud. In those seconds I was already aware that my life as I knew it had ended. Everything had internalised. The only place where I could survive was in my head. The little girl was dead. Her dreams were atomised. Dust. You stupid, stupid idiot, I heard the voice inside my head. Damn, why did I let this happen to me?

High on the hill and the thrill.

Here are the bald facts. My horse refused a piddly jump, on a piddly little British Horse Society instruction day for piddly middle-aged wannabes playing with their piddly ponies. Harmless, happy people like me, playing at the bottom end of a thrilling, dangerous sport; pretending that I was thirty-two when I was fifty-two. I can still taste bitterness in my mouth, even as I write this, at the unfairness, the bad luck, the everyday, non-earth-shattering mundanity of the whole thing. I was a competent, experienced rider on a competent, steady horse, being coached by competent, qualified people. But horses are horses; they belong only to themselves. That day he didn’t want to do it. Jumping stickily. He refused one practice fence. Jumped it the second time. We were still warming up. I doubly committed to go over another jump – ‘Kick on, throw your heart over’ as the old manuals taught – but he didn’t. At the take-off stride, he ducked out sharply, I carried on going. And with impeccable hubris, my pride made me try to stay on by gripping his neck, which was the worst possible thing I could have done. It meant my arms were not in front of me when I hit the ground, so I did a fairly steep, slow-motion head plant. My body and long, long legs pivoted over my neck. ‘It just looked like an ordinary fall,’ said a friend nearby, shrugging helplessly at the memory. A millimetre or two difference, I would have been fine.